By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As I watched my friends—the monks from the old Trappist monastery in Northern Utah—cope for the last five years with the closure of their beloved Huntsville abbey, I never dreamed I’d have to try to emulate their fine example of living with significant change. Then the 150-year old law firm where I have worked for almost four decades closed its doors.
Due to severely changing forces in the Salt Lake City legal market—including new intense competition for talent and from global mega-firms—my law firm made the difficult decision to wind up its business. Some thirty lawyers (including me) from my firm, known as Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough, have joined another legacy Utah firm, Parsons Behle & Latimer.
I hope and believe this decision will help us confront the onslaught from the legal leviathans. It is a good strategy, but not without its consequences.
I started at Jones Waldo right after law school ended in 1986 and never left. I enthusiastically applied to this wonderful workplace a concept the Trappist forefathers had coined a thousand years ago to describe the charism of the monks. Thus, I became “a lover of the brethren and the place.”
Needless to say, the sudden demise of the only place you’ve worked during your entire adult life is traumatic. When asked what emotion he felt about these circumstances, Mark Tolman—one of my fine law partners—said, “All of them.” Surprisingly, it is possible to feel grief, fear, sadness, and uncertainty at the same exact moment you are feeling excitement, hope, anticipation, and gratitude.
As I’ve navigated my way through these challenging times, I’ve realized they are not much different from what my friends the Utah monks experienced during the last few years. Beginning in the 1970s, after a family divorce, I basically grew up at the Huntsville monastery with the monks as surrogate fathers. I tell this story in my new book, Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021).
The Utah monastery—founded 75 years ago in July 1947—closed its doors in 2017 due to a variety of changing forces in the monastic world. A dozen or so of the remaining monks had to go somewhere else. Some joined other abbeys. Most moved together to live in a Salt Lake City retirement community that could help meet their geriatric and medical needs.
As a longtime friend of the Trappists, I watched this play out in real time. In the moment, my concern was for the well-being of the monks. It turned out, however, to be hours well-spent for my own personal edification too. As I watched, I absorbed five important lessons about facing change that may just help me with my own difficult professional transition.
Lesson One: Find happiness where you are
Utah Trappist monk Father Alan Hohl—a former Navy aviator—cherished the Huntsville abbey where he spent two-thirds of his long life. He devoted many of his adult years to watering the monastery’s lush cultivated fields. He built a barn from leftover pallet wood. He led the monks in daily chants. He loved to putter around and patch up the simple Quonset hut building where he lived and prayed.
Father Alan was terribly sad when it all ended, and the monastery closed. Yet, instead of wallowing in his despair, he raved about the small retirement home apartment where he lived out his final five years. He thought it was like a palace.
With great joy, he told me how he had converted one bedroom into a chapel where he could say mass each day. He loved watching the World Series each fall. And once he pointed to his refrigerator and excitedly told me, “It always has a beer in it!” The old monk somehow had managed to find happiness where he was, instead of despairing about where happiness once had been.
Lesson Two: Heal pain with love
Shortly after the Trappists first arrived in Utah, Brother Nicholas Prinster decided to leave his boyhood home in Grand Junction, Colorado. He opted out of medical school, disclaimed his rights to the successful family business, and joined the new monastery.
For the next seven decades, the tall, strong, silent man herded cattle in Huntsville, ran the abbey farm, and built beautiful clocks for his family, friends, and neighbors. His heart was broken when his lovely monastery closed.
Although I am told he struggled to discern any divine will in the painful decision, he accepted it…quietly. The last time I saw him at the Salt Lake City retirement home, he was smiling and placidly pointing out the beautiful flowers growing along the path where I was pushing his wheelchair.
Brother Nicholas knew how to confront and heal the pain all too present in any life, including in the life of a monk. He once explained this formula in a eulogy he wrote for a family member, “We are all of us broken. We live by mending, and the glue that we are mended with is the grace of God, and what is the grace of God but love?”
Lesson Three: Live in the moment
Father Patrick Boyle from St. Louis arrived at the Huntsville abbey in 1950, right after watching Stan Musial hit a home run for his beloved Cardinals. Once at the Utah monastery, he rarely left. Despite staying put, he met (and blessed) hundreds of visitors each year in the abbey bookstore. He was the last monk to leave the premises when the abbey closed in 2017.
After the move, I asked Father Patrick how he felt about leaving the only home he had known for 67 years. I still was mourning the loss of the monastery, so his answer surprised me. He said, “It was a piece of cake.” He explained, “The past is the past, and God will take care of the future, so my job is to live in the present.”
Father Patrick called this attitude the “sacrament of the now moment.” He never missed an opportunity to remind me, “You know what Mike? It works!”
Lesson Four: Be with brothers and sisters
Like all the other Utah monks, when the Huntsville abbey closed, Father Patrick had the chance to move to another Trappist monastery anywhere in the United States. At age 89, he visited and considered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, which is the motherhouse for the Utah abbey.
The 175-year-old Gethsemani Abbey is, by all accounts, a holy and beautiful place. One of its best-known residents, Thomas Merton, described the adjoining Kentucky fields, sun, mud, clay, and wind as “our spiritual directors and our novice-masters.” Declining an invitation to live there would be difficult, yet Father Patrick chose to relocate to the retirement home in Salt Lake City with the other Utah monks.
Trappists take a vow of stability. The order’s website has described that vow this way: “By our vow of stability, we promise to commit ourselves for life to one community of brothers or sisters with whom we will work out our salvation in faith, hope, and love…[we] entrust ourselves to God’s mercy experienced in the company of brothers or sisters who know us and accept us as we are.”
When I asked Father Patrick why he chose to live in two small rooms in a Salt Lake City retirement home instead of at the beautiful abbey in the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, he said, “My vow of stability is not just to a place, it also is to my brothers.” This includes new brothers (and sisters), for Father Patrick now says mass every day with a retired diocesan priest who lives just across the hall.
I think what Father Patrick was trying to tell me—by both his vow and most recent actions—is that life is a constant process of finding and building community, over and over again.
Lesson Five: One bite at a time
Father David Altman was the last abbot (leader) at the Utah Trappist monastery. He lived an interesting life before he became a monk. Born of Jewish parents in Philadelphia, he dated women, studied accounting, and made good money crunching numbers in the Southern California sunshine for defense contractors. He gave it all up to become a monk, but it was not easy.
Father David once explained, “Monastic religious life is much like a marriage, where the primary focus is on efforts to make relationships work, and this is challenging work.” A newspaper reporter asked him how he did it. He said, “Like a flea eats an elephant…one bite at a time.”
He’s used the same basic technique for the last five years during his time of great change, and he’s done so with both grace and dignity. He left behind a monastery he loved to live in a retirement home he barely knew where, as the “youngest” of the remaining monks, he has made relationships work in a completely new setting as he watches over his surviving older brothers.
The law firm and the monastery
A law firm, of course, is not a monastery. The two institutions exist for different purposes, and seek different things in distinct ways. Some might even apply the appellations of heaven and hell to contrast them, but to do so probably would elevate clever prose above actual reality.
Despite their differences, monasteries and law firms are alike too. They are communities. They are places where people commit substantial time, energy, pride, devotion, and even love towards a common goal. And like monasteries, law firms can rise or fall depending on the strengths of the relationships within.
Thanks to my long affiliation with the Utah monastery, and after watching the monks adapt to significant and difficult change, I just may have a game plan for transitioning to a new law firm after leaving behind the one I have loved for 37 years.
Like Father Alan, I will try to find happiness where I am.
Like Brother Nicholas, despite feeling somewhat broken by difficult circumstances, I will look for the love that soothes the pain.
Like Father Patrick, I will try to sustain/build community with my brothers and sisters—both old and new. As I do so, I will seek to live in the moment, trying not to worry too much about what may or may not happen in the future.
And like Father David and the flea that ate the elephant, I will take on these important and somewhat daunting tasks one bite at a time.
I can never fully express, verbally or in writing, the deep sadness I now feel each time I think about my dearly departed Jones Waldo. What I can articulate, however, is a summation of what I now understand—thanks to the Utah monks—about facing and living with change.
Within every goodbye is the promise of a hello.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
The Utah Bar Journal published a version of this article in its September/October 2022 edition.
